In the best of times, Hornos Beach is a palm-lined strand on Acapulco Bay with lots of folks — locals mainly — sitting on rows of white chairs shaded by blue umbrellas, their children digging in the sand or playing footsie with the gentle surf.
On this day, Hornos looked like a rehearsal for “South Pacific.” Sailors of the Mexican navy, armed with shovels, rakes and wheelbarrows, dug and scraped, picking out rocks and bits of the Third World from the mostly deserted beach.
Nearby, a civilian supervisor wearing an official-looking T-shirt and an unofficial-looking cap rested on a replacement chair (with blue umbrella), one of the few. Exactly 34 days after an edge of el huracan Paulina had dumped 25 inches of rain on Acapulco in 10 hours, he tried to explain what had happened here.
“Everything there . . .,” began the civilian, gesturing toward the mountains behind the fancy and not-so-fancy hotels lining the Avenida Costera Miguel Aleman. He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, with a sweep of the arm he told the story: The rushing water had carried what was up there down here.
Then his voice grew assured.
“In one month,” he said, “everything will be clean.”
Astoundingly, as we talked during a mid-November visit, most everything was clean already. The cleanup at Hornos may have been a work in progress, but Condesa Beach was already pristine, as was Icacos, and Caleta, and Caletilla, and Revolcadero.
The mud that had washed down from the mountains, the mud that had turned to blowing dust, the dust that had moved the government to hand out more than a million blue surgical masks to the people here — all that was virtually gone from the Costera.
Two essentials remained: Acapulco, sparkling and swaggering and glorious once again — and the resolve of the people of Guerrero state.
“The positive effort that was made here after the storm was just incredible,” said Wayne Sisson, director of golf for the sister Princess and Pierre Marques hotels. “Everybody,” said Rodolfo Osoyo, greeter at Carlos’n Charlie’s, a landmark restaurant-bar, “was sweeping and cleaning.”
“We are back,” said Alejandro G. Molina, director general of the Acapulco Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Standing on our feet.”
In truth, this city of 1.2 million, in particular the tourist zone that hugs the four-mile shoreline of Acapulco Bay, wasn’t all that badly ravaged. In the wake of the Oct. 9 storm, TV and print news reports had reported “devastation” in Acapulco, and the reports essentially were accurate — there was devastation, along with the loss of 160 lives.
But it was high above the bay, in places tourists seldom visit. Along the Costera, things were messy but largely functional.
“Everything was open,” said Antelmo Miranda, owner of the Hotel Acapulco Diana, a block off the main drag. “The tourist section, they got it ready in like two days,” said Osoyo.
Hardest hit beach was Hornos. The rest, the ones favored by tourists who stay at the resort’s prime hotels, took less of a hit and now looked as if nothing had happened at all.
“We have four rivers that come through the hills to the bay,” said Molina. “For years, people have built small houses made of poor construction material on the river banks. This is a problem that we have.”
When Hurricane Pauline unloaded its deluge, Molina said, what normally were little more than drainage ditches became raging torrents that undercut roads and buildings, turned rocks into battering rams that crashed through walls and swept those tar-paper shacks into the rapids.
The evidence, even weeks later, was startling.
“Right here was my house,” said Apolinar Barbosa, who shared it with his 10-year-old son. What remained were scraps of cloth and bits of plastic. Immediately below him was a pile of white rocks and a hint of a stream; a mile or so below him was Acapulco Bay.
“It was a small river,” Barbosa said. “When the water came, we went up to the street, because we were afraid it would take us too.”
Where does he live today?
“I built a small house,” he said. Within days, a few yards from where his former shack once stood, he had built another, from whatever materials he could salvage.
The unsalvageable materials were washed down the mountain, snagged by boulders and trees near the riverbeds. Smaller remnants were buried in sandy mud on the streets and on beaches where the channels emptied into the bay.
That’s what the sailors were picking out of Hornos Beach.
Acapulco’s two worlds had truly come together.
In the first two weeks after the storm, President Ernesto Zedillo — who cut short a state visit to Germany — made four visits to Acapulco, joined at times by members of his cabinet. (The city’s mayor had been on vacation in Disneyland; his leisurely return still had locals grumbling.) Soldiers, sailors and marines were dispatched to help the city clean up, joining thousands of volunteers.
Nowhere were repairs more evident than on the winding mountain road — the Scenic Highway — that links the city with its airport. Gashed by falling boulders, weakened by landslides and partially buried in mud, it was reopened within a week and in great shape during my visit.
Repairs, I told guide Ricardo Morales, don’t typically happen that quickly in Mexico. “I know,” said Morales, a part-time English teacher. “But it was necessary. We know we need the tourism.”
Power and water were quickly restored to the tourist areas. The three major hotels actually closed by the water — the Continental Plaza, Maris and Las Hamacas — were back in operation within days; five days after the storm, the city’s convention center was able to host an international convention of miners.
Deluxe hotels popular with American tourists and cruise lines — including the Acapulco Princess, Las Brisas, the Hyatt Regency, Acapulco Plaza, El Cano and Fiesta Americana Condesa (the former Condesa del Mar) — never closed at all. Popular restaurants and the city’s famous discos were largely unaffected, and during my visit were operating normally; on a Thursday night, Madeiras — possibly Acapulco’s finest restaurant, with a spectacular bay view — was packed.
Some of the flimsy, palapa-topped restaurants on Hornos Beach were washed away. The ones with walls survived. Sirocco, a 30-year-old white-walled landmark renowned for its Spanish food, closed for just three days.
“The people in the mountains, the poor people, need a lot of help, but that can’t be taken care of in a week,” said Sirocco owner Joaquin Portilla, whose father built the place. “The beach will be better than it was before.”
Of the city’s four 18-hole golf courses, only the Pierre Marques course was still closed in mid-November. Sisson, the director, said the course would be ready by Dec. 1, then reflected on what had been, before Oct. 9, an unusually dry summer.
“About two weeks before this hurricane,” said Sisson. “we were standing around joking, `We need someone to do a rain dance here.’
“We got what we wished for.”
Some hotels reported a rush of early cancellations, but personnel said those have slowed. All, it seemed, got calls.
“Longtime customers called us, people from New York and Chicago and everywhere, to see what we needed,” said Sergio Ricardo, assistant manager at the luxury Princess. “They sent us clothes, and we sent them to the various children’s shelters.”
“Some people are afraid, but this is natural,” said Miranda, who built the Acapulco Diana 13 years ago. His message, one confirmed by this visit, was that there’s nothing to fear: If you liked us before, you’ll like us now.
“Acapulco,” Miranda said, “is ready.”
